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FFmpeg / libav

GPU-accelerated video processing integrated into the most popular open-source multimedia tools.

FFmpeg and libav are among the most popular open-source multimedia manipulation tools with a library of plugins that can be applied to various parts of the audio and video processing pipelines and have achieved wide adoption across the world.

Video encoding, decoding and transcoding are some of the most popular applications of FFmpeg. Thanks to the support of the FFmpeg and libav community and contributions from NVIDIA engineers, both of these tools now support native NVIDIA GPU hardware accelerated video encoding and decoding through the integration of the NVIDIA Video Codec SDK.

FFmpeg uses Video Codec SDK

If you have an NVIDIA GPU which supports hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding, it’s simply a matter of compiling FFmpeg binary with the required support for NVIDIA libraries and using the resulting binaries to speed up video encoding/decoding.

FFmpeg in Action

FFmpeg is used by many projects, including Google Chrome and VLC player. You can easily integrate NVIDIA hardware-acceleration to these applications by configuring FFmpeg to use NVIDIA GPUs for video encoding and decoding tasks.

HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder available for Linux, Mac, and Windows.

HandBrake works with most common video files and formats, including ones created by consumer and professional video cameras, mobile devices such as phones and tablets, game and computer screen recordings, and DVD and Blu-ray discs. HandBrake leverages tools such as Libav, x264, and x265 to create new MP4 or MKV video files from these.

Plex Media Server is a client-server media player system and software suite that runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, FreeBSD or a NAS. Plex organizes all of the videos, music, and photos from your computer’s personal media library and let you stream to your devices.

The Plex Transcoder uses FFmpeg to handle and translates your media into that the format your client device supports.

How to use FFmpeg/libav with NVIDIA GPU-acceleration

Decode a single H.264 to YUV

To decode a single H.264 encoded elementary bitstream file into YUV, use the following command: